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James Bulger mother 'disgusted' at Oscar nomination for film about son's brutal murder

Denise Fergus previously called for the film to be removed from the Academy shortlist

Jacob Stolworthy

Tuesday 22 January 2019 17:04 GMT

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James Bulger's mother Denise Fergus: short film 'Detainment' about killers should be removed from Oscars shortlist

The mother of James Bulger has expressed her "disgust" after a documentary about her son's murder earned an Oscar nomination.

Irish filmmaker Vincent Lambe’s short film Detainment is based on transcripts of police interviews with Robert Thompson and Jon Venables, who were convicted of murdering two-year-old Bulger after abducting him from a shopping centre when they were 10.

Denise Fergus previously called for the film to be removed from the Oscars shortlist in the Best Live Action Short category. However, earlier today, The Big Sick star Kumail Nanjiani and Tracee Ellis Ross (Black-ish) announced it had indeed been nominated.

"I cannot express how disgusted and upset I am at this so-called film that has been made and now nominated for an Oscar," Fergus wrote in a statement posted on Twitter.

"It's one thing making a film like this without contacting or getting permission from James's family, but another to have a child re-enact the final hour of James's life before he was brutally murdered and making myself and my family have to relive this all over again."

She thanked all who had signed a petition calling for the Academy to boycott the film, before continuing: "I'm so angry and upset at this present time. I just hope the film doesn't win its category in the Oscars."

Lambe has since apologised for not consulting with the family beforehand, but denied making the film for “financial gain."

Speaking to RTE, he said: “[Detained] was never intended to bring any more anguish to the Bulger family. In hindsight, I think we probably should have got in touch or let her [Denise Fergus] know we were going to make it."

The 10 worst Oscar Best Picture winners

Show all 10

1/10The 10 worst Oscar Best Picture winners

The 10 worst Oscar Best Picture winners

10. The Life of Emile Zola

Prestige counts at the Oscars. That is why a stodgy literary biopic like The Life of Emile Zola somehow won the main award at the 1937 Oscars. It’s a solid and worthy piece of work, with a grandstanding performance from Paul Muni (under a lot of whiskers) as the campaigning French novelist. The idea, though, that it is one of the “few truly great pictures of all time”, as its own publicity suggested, is clearly idiotic.

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The 10 worst Oscar Best Picture winners

9. Rocky

It may seem churlish to go after an underdog like Rocky but this was an undeserving Best Picture winner. The Academy voters in 1976 acted as if they were punch drunk and had spent too long in the ring with Apollo Creed. The problem with its victory wasn’t so much the film itself but with the other nominees that were spurned in its favour. Taxi Driver, All the President’s Men and Network all surely had a better claim to that year’s statuette.

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The 10 worst Oscar Best Picture winners

8. Around the World in 80 Days

This was a perfectly amiable big-budget travelogue but you can’t help but suspect its Best Picture Oscar was more to do with the marketing and hustling skills of its producer, Mike Todd, than with any brilliance in the filmmaking. It was directed by the Englishman Michael Anderson, previously best known for The Dam Busters, and featured David Niven as the intrepid traveller, Phileas Fogg, who bets he can travel all the way round the world in a little over two months.

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The 10 worst Oscar Best Picture winners

7. Crash

Paul Haggis’s Crash is a decent and well-meaning study of the consequences of racism and violence in contemporary LA. It was independently made and had a large ensemble cast, all giving heartfelt performances. However, Robert Altman had covered similar territory better in Short Cuts and the feeling persisted that it had won the Best Picture award because some Academy voters were determined not to give the Oscar to the gay-themed contemporary western Brokeback Mountain.

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The 10 worst Oscar Best Picture winners

6. Chicago

You rarely win an Oscar without a strong marketing campaign. The now disgraced distributor/producer Harvey Weinstein knew the secrets of getting Academy voters on his side better than anyone else in the business. Whether it was the Blitz-like approach to advertising in the trade press, or the timing of the awards screenings, or the way he kept the film’s stars in front of the media or his relentless courtship of the Academy members, he was arguably as important to the Oscar success of the so-so musical Chicago as any of the creative talent behind it.

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The 10 worst Oscar Best Picture winners

5. A Beautiful Mind

It’s not bad. It’s a love story that touches on mental illness and mathematics (neither usually subjects that Hollywood embraces). Russell Crowe gives a fine performance as John Nash, the Nobel prize-winning boffin with the beautiful but unstable mind. Nonetheless, Ron Howard’s biopic isn’t any kind of classic. It won its Best Picture Oscar in an unusually thin year.

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The 10 worst Oscar Best Picture winners

4. Marty

Marty, the 1955 winner, isn’t even the best version of its own subject matter. This story, scripted by the great Paddy Chayevsky, about an emotionally repressed Italian American butcher from the Bronx looking for love, had already been made as a live TV drama the year before. In the small-screen version, Rod Steiger gave a superlative performance in the lead role. Ernest Borgnine in the film version can’t help but seem like second best to anyone who saw Steiger in the same part. Whereas the puggish Borgnine makes Marty a figure of pity, Steiger turned him into a full blown tragic hero.

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The 10 worst Oscar Best Picture winners

3. Out of Africa

You’ll remember the pink flamingos and all those scenes of beautiful Kenyan landscapes that looked as if they were cribbed from a David Attenborough natural history documentary. You won’t ever forget Meryl Streep’s eccentric accent as the Danish baroness and author, Karen Blixen (“I had a farm in Africa at the foot of the Ngong hills”). This is mushy stuff, though, and hardly deserving of its Oscar.

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The 10 worst Oscar Best Picture winners

2. Braveheart

This rousing, Scottish-set (but partly Irish-filmed) medieval epic is famous for its scenes of William Wallace’s army in blue faces lifting their kilts and baring their bums. Regardless of how accurate this was as history, it played into ongoing debates about devolution and Scottish independence. The film also did its bit for the Scottish tourism business. Mel Gibson knows how to stage a battle scene. Whether that qualifies his film for a Best Picture Oscar is another matter.

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The 10 worst Oscar Best Picture winners

1. The Greatest Show on Earth

From a vantage point 67 years on, the decision to give the Best Picture Oscar to Cecil B DeMille’s circus epic in 1952 is truly baffling. British viewers who have seen it will almost certainly have done so on TV (where its 152-minute running time made it useful for filling in gaps in the schedule). It has a decent cast and some reasonable stunts but Academy voters were surely clowning around when they chose it over other nominees in the same year which have aged far, far better like High Noon and The Quiet Man.

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You can find a full list of the 2019 Oscar nominations here.

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